I’m on vacation!

Well, just about, anyway. I suppose it starts properly tomorrow, this is just a regular weekend where my sunday evening does not have any creeping dread. Or not for the usual reason, at least. I already feel myself decompressing a bit, able to open my mind beyond my usual routines. I always try to get completely out of the work mindset for these, though it can be difficult at times. Well, let’s get back to this ancient tome, I still want to keep this streak of posts alive.

Summary

After several more days, the Pequod happens upon another whaling boat, the Delight. This ship is displaying the destroyed remnants of a boat hanging above its deck, as the crew prepares for a burial at sea.

Ahab asks his customary question of the captain, at a distance, and is told that they did encounter the While Whale, which is the cause for the ruined boat and the burial. That corpse is the only one of five crewmen who they were able to recover any part of. The captain of the Delight abruptly tells his crew to prepare to toss the body overboard, and Ahab orders his crew to continue on immediately.

But they are not able to escape the sound of the splash as the hammock-wrapped whaler goes to his final rest.

Analysis

Following directly on the end of the last chapter, we have here another portent of doom, this one pretty direct and unmistakable. It’s almost not even a “portent” so much as a logical indication that the current course of action is not safe, a reminder of what awaits the Pequod when it finally finds its quarry.

Hunting Death

It’s a funny thing, but it’s easy to forget that Moby Dick is, in fact, extremely dangerous and should be avoided by any sane whaling captain.

You spend so much time caught up in the mythology that Ishmael and Ahab are weaving, the grand hero and his mad quest for revenge, the magical harpoon baptized in heathen blood, so on and so forth. At the end of the day, the whale itself becomes a kind of abstraction. Like, yeah, it’s gonna be hard, but Ahab seems like he can do anything if he wills it!

And so it’s good to have another reminder that this whale is not actually some sort of supernatural force that exists only in the abstract. It is not a test of character that must be overcome, not a challenge set forth by the gods to try our mighty hero. All of this is the invention of human sophistry, merely casting hopes and fears and narrative upon the world in the hopes of making sense of it.

The warning of the Delight is no such vague prophecy of doom. There are no rules laid out here, no balance of strength and weakness, no key to this lock. There’s simply a danger in the offing. Blood on the wind. The splash of death upon the planks of the hull, inescapable as the sound of the splash of a corpse hitting the water.

This quest is self-destructive not because it is against god or some other vague philosophical notion of fate, but for rather mundane and stupid reasons. A long time ago, on this blog, I wrote about how leftist thought often has this notion of throwing back this veil of sophistry and abstraction, getting down to material conditions of a situation. And here we have it: the Pequod is in danger because there is a dangerous animal nearby.

Inescapable Reality

Ishmael has spilled a lot of ink in this dense brick of a novel talking about the dangers of the fishery, and now it is time to let the rubber meet the road.

Upon the stranger’s shears were beheld the shattered, white ribs, and some few splintered planks, of what had once been a whale-boat; but you now saw through this wreck, as plainly as you see through the peeled, half-unhinged, and bleaching skeleton of a horse.

I love this paragraph. He is relating the horror of seeing a wrecked boat to an image that would be more familiar to a common reader, at least in concept if not in reality. It’s only a few scraps of wood, but what it represents is death and destruction.

This is the realization of all those tidings of doom and despair from the whalers chapel, way back at the beginning of the book! You will die on the ocean and nobody will find your remains. The vast expanse of water will serve as your unmarked grave.

In the face of this, Ahab’s antics now seem absurd.

“Not forged!” and snatching Perth’s levelled iron from the crotch, Ahab held it out, exclaiming—“Look ye, Nantucketer; here in this hand I hold his death! Tempered in blood, and tempered by lightning are these barbs; and I swear to temper them triply in that hot place behind the fin, where the White Whale most feels his accursed life!”

To use the modern parlance, this is pure, unfiltered cope. An old man ranting about having a magic weapon that will let him live forever. Do the impossible, because he wants it more, because he needs it more than they did. Because he’s special, and his pain is greater than anything they could imagine, and he was chosen by nature.

One of the reasons that Moby Dick is a profound book is that it strips bare the realities of not only religion, but all human belief in abstractions of any kind. The danger that one can fall into by putting too much stock in them, whatever they are. You don’t know which ones are real until you get out there in the world and try it.

Only in retrospect can you build a legend that feels real, but Ishmael staunchly refuses to do so. His record is littered with doubt. Part of him knows the truth, and seeds it in this story left and right. The captain was crazy, he convinced the crew, they all went to their doom.

Reading it again, I find Moby-Dick; or, the Whale to be a profoundly athestic text. And yet, it recognizes with despair that man cannot be separated from these little superstitions. We are all in the position of the sailor, in the end. Completely captured by ideas that have no relation to reality but what is conjured by our minds, because we cannot perceive it directly.

Remember: the whiteness of the whale repulses the eye because it reflects the true nature of reality. Stripping away the garish finery of color, representing things as they truly are. You could say that ideology is the act of creating a story you can tell that explains this discrepancy between the thing as you see it and as it truly is.

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Trying to bring things back around to old themes and ideas I brought up before, and Melville is really cooperating with me on that. That’s just good writing, right there.

Thoughout this novel, the sea has been a symbol of death and pain. It is the site of Ahab and Pip’s trauma, it is the thing that draws Ishmael as a replacement for suicide, it is a harsh and cruel mother to all life, etc etc. The Pequod getting splashed by the water of a corpse thrown overboard as a coffin beats against its hull is perhaps the most direct vision of that particular theme we’ve had yet.

I may write some more this week, on my week off, but about different things. I’ve really been enjoying a couple of games lately, and of course… everything else going on in the world, might be nice to scream about.

Until next time, shipmates!